Protect Your IP Invest NI’s Seminar – The Soundtrack Album

I recorded all the presentations at the Invest Northern Ireland IP event. INI will post the audio soon, but I’m blogging it here in the meantime.

You can download the audio in the normal way. They are each 30 – 40 minutes long and around 30MB.

Matthew Ford and Rory Campbell of Ford Campbell LLP; a specialist commercial, technology, IP and media law practice advising a range of media clients including independent producers, broadcasters, studios, writers, artists, contributors and talent from across the TV and film industry.

If you Donald Clarke’s name into a Google you will find his blog Plan B. But he has more than one blog and if you can find Artyfacts, I commend it to you – unless you are being featured unfavourably. Wonderfully rude.

Donald designed some of the first computer-based learning programmes in the early 1980s. He went on to co-found Epic Group in 1986, now the UK’s market leader in e-learning. As former CEO, Donald’s experience ranges from programming to course development, commercial delivery and strategic management.

In 2001, Donald won the ‘Outstanding Achievement in E-learning Award’ at the World Open Learning Conference and many other awards for business innovation and for technology-based learning.

Now retired from Epic, his profile on the Plan B blog is simply:
“Finally have enough time to attend, read, listen, watch and comment on anything I want to.”

No matter how fantastic the idea, timing is everything. A couple of weeks before last week’s tube strike in London Malcolm Barclay got approval for London Bus 1.2

At the beginning of last August he blogged:
Oh dear, the cat has been well and truly released from the bag now. I asked Apple weeks ago not to publish TubeStatus whilst I worked out what to do with it copyright wise (and hence subsequently open sourced it). It seems that didn’t make it to the right department and I learned this morning from a user that it was indeed available in the application store and had been downloaded 2,331 times in its first 2 days and has made the top 15 free applications!
The feedback has been phenomenal; but I am going to have to do something about licensing the information or request that it is pulled from the application store (again).

Within a week there had been more than 25,000 downloads. I don’t know what the status is for London Bus, but I expect the timing could really not have been better.

But with this success comes the complication of who owns what. The world famous Tube Map I expect is copyright and what about the tube times?

Now even though it has been a long time since I was actively involved in the music industry, there are some bands that have not escaped my attention:

And So I Watch You From Afar
Jet Plane Landing
Oppenheimer
Fighting With Wire

Among them. Bands championed by Andrew Ferrises label Small Town America.
Set up in 2001, described as “a DIY collective in the truest sense; all our staff are volunteers – we only work here because we love the music we’re putting out. It really is that simple. We want to make the sort of records that we would buy ourselves.”
So in the digital age, is it possible to have a successful music business that can both share the music that people are passionate about while retaining the rights surrounding the work – or is that even the right way to be thinking about it?

Stewart Worthington’s back ground is management, small business and music. He was head of Training and Education for the Music Managers’ Forum – and international trade association of artist managers in the music industry. He was also Project manager of Manchester City Music Industry Network an agency established to help the economic development of the Music Industry in the city.